Empire Film Guide: The Definitive Bible for Film Lovers from the World's Best Movie Magazine

by Empire Magazine

'Empire magazine is the coolest magazine, man . . . It's never got an axe to grind, it's not a kiss-my-ass magazine but it doesn't want to take a chomp out of you either' Quentin Tarantino

The team behind Britain's biggest-selling movie magazine bring you over 2,800 reviews of some of the most important movies, both past and present. Each review offers star ratings and award guides as well as a lengthy and informative review of each film, all compiled by Empire's team of experts in the magazine's inimitable style. This indispensable guide also includes photos, sidebars and boxouts of films to see, and lists of Top 10s to make film viewing even more entertaining.

1128 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2006

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guide is just stuffed like a plum pudding with really fun facts about the making of each of these 3000 movies. Even the stuff about movies you have no desire to see is great. Here they are on Fellini Satyricon (1969) which as you know is about sexual debauchery and freakish sadism during the reign of Nero

Fellini’s casting ambitions soon came to encompass Mae West, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, Danny Kaye and Boris Karloff. Thwarted by their reluctance, he declared that unless he could land Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Brigitte Bardot, Jerry Lewis, Peter O’Toole, Lee Marvin, The Beatles and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Charles de Gaulle he would settle for unknowns. So… he hired Martin Potter (a bit parter), Chelsea hippy Max Born and New Yorker Hiram Keller, who’d had a minor slot in Hair.

I would have loved to see Ex-Prez Lyndon B Johnson in Fellini-Satyricon…. Probably as a degenerate old senator with a villa stuffed with concubines of all sexes, or an implacable executioner ordering a hermaphrodite to be disembowelled… I can see it now. And really, what else was Lyndon doing in 1969 anyway? He had the time. What a missed opportunity.

I have been reading this Empire Film Guide for months now and compared with the better known 1001 Films You Must See Before Bedtime it looks so so so dull, there are no pix, none at all – 1001 Films is drenched in really beautiful pix – but the Empire writers are vastly more entertaining :

When Woody Allen saw the rough cut of Manhattan he asked producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe if United Artists would consider destroying every frame if he did his next film for them for free.

Stanley Kubrick was looking for his next project after Barry Lyndon. As his then secretary recalled, he was stationed in his office with a stack of recent books, opening them, starting to read, then thwumpp! She would hear the sound of a paperback meeting the wall. The process went on for a while. Then, all of a sudden, there was silence. Kubrick had picked up a novel called The Shining…

(Just imagine, each thwumpp indicates an author missing out on a couple million dollars…. It’s merciful that we don’t know who they are.)



Take 29, Mr President!

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

No, not the "definitive Bible" for film lovers, as stated, but as good as any films-rated guide as has been published. This one is picky; it doesn't try for the usual Maltin or Halliwell approach of offering a general range of general releases. This one is unapologetically snooty; it presents the creme de la creme, and selects very well (one standard I apply is whether a film guide includes the Cuban film "Memories of Underdevelopment" and the Argentinian film "Hour of the Furnaces", and this book does. I suppose it would be asking too much that it include another Latin American masterpiece of equal weight, "The Battle of Chile," and indeed, it does not.) There are what I'd call gaps here. The avant-garde is ignored; there is no Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger or Harry Smith. Any definitive film guide would include these. But the films included are good ones; the entries lively and informative and more in-depth than is typical of this kind of guide. It is better by far than James Monaco's awful "The Movie Guide," which tries a similar approach and fails miserably. As usual, I can see there will be disagreements; some of the ratings for more recent critically acclaimed commercial films are too high (I believe that with very few exceptions that only time will tell as to whether a movie really merits the highest possible rating.) On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked that the guide did not go into rapturous orgasms over Hitchcock's "Vertigo," which is the fashion of late, and gave it a rating two grades below the highest.
I just bought this at Half Price for $3.98 which is pretty much a steal for a fulsome, 1100+ page film guide of this quality. Will be referring to this often, I suspect.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Film buff heaven! should have come with a bag of popcorn.